Data Governance vs. Data Protection vs. Information Security: Understanding the Difference

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee says, “Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.”

Is your organization protecting its data and every crucial information? What governs your data?

Well, your data is centered around three terms – Data Governance, Data Protection, and Information Security.

Although these terminologies are interrelated, they are all very different from each other.

With this blog post, let’s dive deeper into understanding what these three components are and how they differentiate from each other.

Here we go!

Key Differences Among Information Security, Data Governance, and Data Protection

Data Governance

It refers to the procedures organizations follow to govern their data, which can be in the form of digital or hard copy assets.

The Data Governance Institute defines Data Governance as, “a system of decision rights and accountabilities for info-related processes, executed according to agreed-upon models which describe who can take what actions with what information, and when, under what circumstances, using what methods.”

Data governance is important for businesses because:

a. It protects them against cyber attacks and security breaches.
b. It reduces data management costs.
c. It increases the ROI of your data analytics.
d. It is easier to maintain compliance standards.
e. It allows better decision-making.

The top four Data Governance models are given below that can be adopted based upon your business needs:

1. Decentralized Execution for Sole Proprietorship

As the name suggests, this type of model works perfectly for individual business owners. An individual who creates and sets up their data is usually the one who uses it.

2. Decentralized Execution for Team

This model is for business owners who have to manage and maintain their master data. Here, data is shared among multiple employees working across teams.

3. Centralized Governance

In such a model, a business owner or a group of business owners control the master data and set up data as per the requests received from different departments.

This type of setup is ideal for companies with a huge strength of employees as it centralizes the data and allows business leader(s) to distribute it among employees and regulate how information is shared internally.

4. Centralized Data Governance and Decentralized Execution

This model is great for larger businesses since both the management and team members are responsible for collecting and sharing internal data.

Data Protection

Data protection is the process of protecting significant data from unauthorized access to prevent it from being compromised. It ensures that the data is not corrupted and is in complete compliance with applicable regulations.

The scope of data protection goes beyond data availability and usability. The term covers areas such as data immutability, preservation, and destruction.

Data protection is broadly divided into these three categories:

a. Traditional data protection
b. Data security
c. Data privacy

Source

Top 5 Data Protection Practices & Technologies

1. Data Loss Prevention: It is a set of strategies and tools that can be used to avoid data stealing, or losing it accidentally.

2. Firewalls: These are utilities that provide access to only filtered network traffic. Firewalls enable only authorized users to access or transfer data.

3. Encryption: A practice that encodes data content with an algorithm that can be decrypted with the right encryption key. If your data-in-transit and data-at-rest are encrypted, they will remain protected from unauthorized access if there’s a data breach.

4. Authentication: Authentications such as two-factor authentication and multi-factor authentication help in verifying user credentials. Even if the password gets stolen, these will prevent cyber attackers from getting access to one’s account.

5. Endpoint Protection: It poses as a gateway to your network, ports, and every connected device. This practice secures your system’s endpoints from getting exploited by malicious activities.

Information Security

Information Security, also popularly known as InfoSec, includes all the processes and tools that an organization uses to safeguard information.

InfoSec is an evolving sector that includes protecting sensitive information from unauthorized activities like modification, inspection, destruction, etc.

It aims to ensure the safety and privacy of critical information such as financial data, account details, and intellectual property.

3 Principles of Information Security

There are three major tenets of Information Security – confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Together they form the CIA Triad. These principles are explained below:

Source

a. Confidentiality: Confidentiality measures are designed to protect your information from getting disclosed to unauthorized users. This principle guarantees that only the permitted users should have access to sensitive information to perform their organizational functions.

b. Integrity: It ensures the complete accuracy of data so that it doesn’t get edited in any unwarranted ways. Hence, ensuring data integrity and reliability.

c. Availability: This ensures that a system must be capable of providing the necessary information when needed. The goal of availability is to make software systems and data available to specified users at a given time to complete all the organizational processes.

Wrapping Up

The bottom line is that these three components are critical for the success of an organization.

Having all three components in place ensures the right people have access to crucial data, appropriate security controls are implemented, and sensitive data remains protected.

Thus, they should form a part of your overall business strategy.

Need To Learn More About Security, Protection & Governance? Contact Us!